Talk and Book Signing with local author Quan Barry

Join us on the UW campus for an author’s talk and book signing by UW–Madison English Professor Amy Quan Barry. An award-winning poet, Barry’s first novel, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born: A Novel, was just published in February to rave reviews. The Boston Globe says: “Barry’s first novel . . . sympathetically and poetically chronicles the violent and mournful history of Vietnam, through the eyes and ears of a mystical girl named Rabbit.” New York Times Book Review calls it “Fascinating…deeply affecting.” This evening event is free and open to the public. It’s being held on Thursday, March 12, from 6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. in 460 Memorial Library, 728 State St. Copies of this book and Loose Strife, Barry’s latest collection of poems, will be available to purchase. Light refreshments will also be provided. This event is sponsored by UW–Madison Friends of the Libraries, Department of English and Program in Creative Writing.

One of Library Journal’s Six Essential Debuts of February 2015, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born is being published in the year of the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Quan Barry takes the reader on a mystical journey through modern Vietnamese history as experienced by Rabbit, a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before reunification, who has the ability to hear the voices of the dead. As Library Journal says: “Saigon-born Barry gives her narrative urgency, and her novel is part of a new wave of literature reflecting on the Vietnam experience.”

Poet Quan Barry said the poems in her new collection Loose Strife were initially inspired by Aeschylus’s fifth-century B.C. trilogy “The Oresteia,” which chronicles the fall of the House of Atreides. “Loose Strife investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely ‘to loose battle’ or ‘sow chaos,’ a concept which is still very much with us more than twenty-five hundred years later, “she explained.

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also the author of four poetry collections Asylum, Controvertibles, Water Puppets and Loose Strife, her newest book of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and other literary publications. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Barry lives in Wisconsin.

For more information about this and other Friends event, please visit: www.library.wisc.edu/friends or email: friends@library.wisc.edu or call: (608) 265-2505.